The growth and competition in the casino gaming market in recent years and the increasingly sophisticated and complex technology being integrated into the gaming environment, at the individual game, casino management, and auditing levels, presents both challenges and opportunities to game manufacturers, gaming establishment operators, and regulatory agencies. The technological capabilities and requirements of, for example, advanced electronic games, multi-site gaming operations, detailed player tracking, wide area progressive jackpots, and various alternatives to the use of currency and coins by players, all present a potentially huge pool of ever-changing data which can be of great value to casino operators (from a management standpoint) and to regulators from an audit/compliance standpoint.
One area that has received a lot of attention in recent years has been providing added promotional incentives to players of gaming machines, such as video slot machines, video poker machines, etc. One type of promotional incentive is a “free play” award redeemable at the gaming machine and is typically based on a player's previous level of play. Casino marketing spends great amounts of time, segmenting players into groups to determine what amount of “free play” to preload into the player tracking system so when the player plays they can redeem their “free play” award at the gaming device.
Players may also be given a promotional incentive through a player tracking club. Usually, a player is identified during play by a player tracking ID card and/or a player identification number. The player tracking system tracks the player's play and awards player tracking points according to established criteria. The player tracking points may be redeemed for prizes, such as complimentary meals or merchandise. Again, this type of manual promotional incentive is casino resource intensive. Another type of incentive is given through an automated progressive jackpot award. A progressive jackpot award is a constantly accumulating award based on coin or credit-in, i.e., the tokens played by players, on a plurality of predetermined gaming machines, such as slot or video slot machines. The progressive jackpot award has a minimum value and increases until some maximum value. The progressive jackpot award is awarded to the player under some predetermined conditions. Additionally, the awarding of the progressive jackpot may also trigger a set amount of “free play” incentives to all non-jackpot players playing at gaming machines at the time that the progressive jackpot is hit.
However, these systems do not provide incentives in the form of interesting secondary games to further encourage players to play the gaming machines. Moreover, these systems require manual intervention and consume vast casino resources to maintain and operate.
The present invention is aimed at one or more of the problems as set forth above.